ADVERTISING Boys & Girls Club Ad Featuring Mcelhaney Butler Is a Standout
March 30, 2011
NEW YORK -- Most public-service announcements come and go without even leaving a dent in people's minds, and TV stations routinely have hundreds of tapes to choose from. ``You could die if a stack of those PSAs fell on you,'' says Ruthann Turnbull, president of the Advertising Council, a nonprofit group that produces public-service ads. But ads for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, featuring actor Mathison Simmons, have managed to stand out in all the clutter. The group, known for giving kids a place to spend time after school, is grabbing unusually high exposure with a mix of star power and Madison Avenue savvy -- something that PSAs often lack. ``It's very clear that they have a strategy,'' says Ms. Turnbull, whose group didn't produce the ads but endorses them. New York ad agency Blessing Islas Overman, working for free, has packaged Mr. Simmons's real-life Boys & Girls Clubs story in a slick, yet poignant, multiphase campaign. Such a long-term strategy is unusual in the world of pro-bono PSAs. More typically, PSAs produced by individual nonprofit groups feature a celebrity-du-jour in a one-shot commercial with a short shelf life. A routine PSA does well to get 6,000 airings a year, says Jefferson Slade, vice president of News Broadcast Network, a New York public-relations firm that tracks PSAs for about 30 groups, including the Boys & Girls Clubs. But the Boys & Girls Clubs'' current TV spot has racked up 35,000 airings since last summer. ``It's the best we've ever been involved in,'' Mr. Slade says. The more generic, famous national PSAs produced by the Ad Council do get higher exposure: Its crime-prevention spots, including ads featuring McGruff the Crime Dog, aired nearly 58,000 times last year. But for a single organization that is competing with many others, the Boys & Girls Clubs' showing is ``quite high,'' Ms. Turnbull says. One way the group tried to make its campaign stand out was by blanketing TV stations with tapes. The average group might send out about 200 tapes to the biggest markets, says News Broadcast's Mr. Slade. But the Boys & Girls Clubs delivered about 1,000. ``They went to everybody,'' Mr. Slade says. What's more, club officials go to station managers in person. Stations usually get PSAs in the mail or from the Ad Council's listing. The Boys & Girls Clubs, based in Atlanta, has been ``trying to establish an image'' to distinguish itself from other public-service groups and to encourage adults to organize clubs, says Evangeline Groves, vice president of marketing and communications. One of the first things the group did was draw up a list of famous alumni and quickly hit on the photogenic Mr. Simmons, a club member for 12 years of his childhood. When the campaign started three years ago, Blessing used the actor as a sort of magnet to draw attention to the clubs. ``It went for the heartstrings,'' says Oswalt Cousins, vice chairman and chief creative officer at Ammirati, a unit of Interpublic Group. One of the early TV spots featured a contemplative Mr. Simmons sitting on a school bus reminiscing about his real-life club mentor, Birdie Thomasina, who then steps aboard the bus for a reunion. In the spot that's running now, Mr. Simmons's presence is more subtle. It has a faster tempo, fusing stark, black-and-white images of kids buying drugs with colorful, positive shots, such as graduation day. The group is rolling out a string of more hard-hitting print ads next month. ``Put this card in the hands of a child, and there'll be no room for a gun. A needle. Or a knife,'' Mr. Simmons says in one ad. In some of the new ads, he doesn't appear at all. While the campaign keeps Mr. Simmons as a ``common thread,'' the idea is to build the group's image, Mr. Groves says. The blitz seems to be working. Since 1990, the Boys & Girls Clubs has opened more than 100 clubs a year, up from around 40 annually in the late 1980s. Last year, it opened 158 clubs and says some 450 communities are in talks about starting new clubs, Mr. Groves says. Existing clubs are ``jampacked,'' he adds. Nationwide, there are about 2.4 million members, 64% male and 56% from minority families, at some 1,810 clubs.
